


salt

by catarinquar



Series: series 01 [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s07e07 Orison, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, as in discussed not depicted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-16 19:57:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16501760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catarinquar/pseuds/catarinquar
Summary: The desperation with which she longs for his hands on her must be the greater of her sins, but she can’t let it happen, not like this. She’s fragile with more fault lines that the mirror, she’ll scream, break, splinter.-post-orison. reclamation is rarely linear.





	salt

**Author's Note:**

> immediate sequel to [we are too shallow and too brave](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15670287), but it is not strictly necessary to have read that one in order to keep up.

Mulder calls her cell phone while she’s stuck at a red light not even three blocks from her apartment. All things considered, she decides she still better pick it up.

“Scully.”

“How are you?” he asks, no preliminary. They shook hands in the basement once; then in a motel room in rainy Oregon she bared her body while he bared his soul. They haven't much bothered with the introductions since.

“I just finished talking with the friendly detectives of MPDC,” she offers. With enough semantical reinterpretation, it could still be a legitimate answer. If they’d been anyone else, people checking up on each other, he might as well have asked, _what are you doing these days?_ with the same meaning. Of course the answer would then be more along the lines of, _I just dropped the kids off at school_. They’re not anyone else. There are no kids. “They decided not to incarcerate me at present.”

“And they’re not going to. Look,” he says, and she looks in every which way as she manoeuvres her car into a parking space, grateful at least that he doesn’t call her out for avoiding the question, until - “I might have promised your mom that you’d give her a call today.”

“Oh.” She trusts that they’ve still got enough of that unspoken communication for the underlying _not happening_ to get across.

“You know, she just wants to be sure you’re alright.”

“Well. I’m not sure I can convince her that I am, and then she’ll want to see me, and then,” _and then she’s going to drag me to church and lock me in the confessional,_ “I’ll scare her.”

He could remind her that Maggie has seen worse, but he doesn’t - and she’s grateful for that, too. “I’ve got it on good authority that you Scully-women don’t scare easily,” he says instead, and she can almost hear the smile in his voice; he's got to be proud of himself for that one.

Even worse, he might be proud of _her_ , yet the fact remains that she _was_ scared last night. It slips out: “I was afraid, Mulder,” then, “the whole time, I was so sure he would kill me.”

Still his silence screams louder than she knows she ever did. She can hear his sharp intake of breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t -”

“Hmn-no, don’t be. I’m just being contrary, I guess,” and if he ever brings it up again she’ll deny it, of course. Might just deny this whole conversation; _sorry, the doctors tell me that I may have sustained a major head trauma when I was attacked in my apartment, who are you again?_ She couldn’t do that to him, but she gets out of the car, slams the door with unnecessary force and tries putting him down gently. “Was there anything else?”

He huffs. “Uh, no. Scully… where are you right now?”

“On my way up to my apartment,” she replies, glad to find that she sounds calm to her own ears at least.

She can hear him swear under his breath. Under other circumstances, his distress might have gotten to her, but this - is something that needs doing. She _knows_ that even before he challenges her, “should you do that?”

Her ankle boots scuff on the salted pavement. She could use a pair of heels right now; misses the security and confidence of the staccato click-clacks echoing through their basement hallway. “Sure. Detective something-or-other told me they were all finished.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Of course it isn’t; you can’t hide a breakdown from an Oxford-trained psychologist, and in any event she just confessed to being scared. “How _are_ you, Scully?”

 _Right now?_ she wants to demand; not necessarily of him, just anyone, the universe at large, whoever's ever done her anything and had the audacity - to do it, or to ask. God; yes, she wants to ask Him, _how do you think I am right now?_ _Right now, these days, in the last eight years, in my entire life? Discount this latest violation, even then, how am I?_

She sighs loud enough for Mulder to hear, jingles her keys before forcing the right one in the lock. “I’m well enough that I can go into my own apartment, Mulder,” and because it's him, because she didn’t accept his offer of breakfast, because maybe, just maybe, she won’t be so fine when it's time for the bathroom - she tells him, “come over in a couple of hours with my things and some lunch, alright?”

Oh. So it is not that any of it _slipped_ out, she realises. No, she might just want him to help her. Or need - she might just want to _let_ him help her.

She hangs up. They haven't much bothered with goodbyes, either; perhaps a mutual delusion that never winding down means they'll both have to be there the next time to continue the - whatever it is.

-

It's the kind of quote she would expect to find on a Hallmark card stuck to an oversized refrigerator in a suburban housewife’s kitchen: that you can fix a broken mirror again, but that the cracks will always be there.

As it is, even if she took the time to go down on her hands and knees in this room of all, to pick up every single shard, glue them back together - even then, her bedroom mirror won't just have cracks. There'll be a thousand little voids, black spots. Missing puzzle pieces. Last night, after the paramedics had had a go at her with their touching and tweezing and incessant questioning, she had still left her apartment with little specks of reflecting glass embedded in her back. She scrubbed them out under the stinging spray of Mulder's shower.

 _Can I have a look down your shower drain? I'm missing little pieces of my mirror_. She’d ask him and he would never let her out of his sight again. Or maybe he would, but only to leave her in a padded cell. To see if she would scream for him as well.

Yesterday she killed a man. In a week she'll get to celebrate her thirty-sixth birthday.

She doesn’t take a step forward so much as lean an inch into the room. The weather is nice, for mid-February. There's sunlight peeking around the edges of the drawn curtains.

Earlier this morning, it was the yellow lamplight from outside Mulder’s bedroom that forced its way through the cracks in the blinds. She woke with his sweaty scent in her nose, his warm chest against hers, his heavy arm draped over her. His half-hard cock between them, resting against her stomach. The first thing she’d felt was a dazed sort of confusion. After that… a lot of things, though not fear.

The fall of 1994 is a three month long series of questions she doesn't know and sometimes doesn’t _want_ the answers to. What Pfaster might have done to her in between driving her off the road and dragging her to his bathroom is only one of those questions, and while she remembers every vivid second of last evening, no missing time, it would not be unthinkable that whatever she's had with Mulder; whatever it is that has had her flushed and squirming in his lap enough times since New Year’s that she's lost count, though he has undoubtedly kept track in a little notebook, _dear diary, this was the fifteenth time and today Scully ripped my shirt off before we even reached the couch_ -

It is not unthinkable that it would all have seeped out with her blood wherever the mirror cut through skin.

On the contrary, in that sickly yet familiar yellow light from the street lamps outside his bedroom, she’d felt safe. Good. They - her and her partner or friend or lover or, or - they were a naked, warm tangle of arms and legs in Mulder’s bed, and it had felt _good_. If he’d been awake…

It wasn't sex that’d had her sweaty and out of breath during the night, though, and a delayed setback was - is - always a possibility. In the end she’d told herself that it was just his entrapping arms that were a little too hot; that made her flee to the bathroom where she considered her hair and the nail scissors at hand before settling for another scalding shower.

Idle hands are the Devil's playthings. She’d had a statement to deliver, then. Now, she has a mirror to replace and an entire home to repair.

She starts with the curtains.

Bible. Bed sheets. Laundry, a change of clothes while she’s at it; the underwire was a mistake. Bookshelf. She rescues Melissa’s photograph from a cracked frame and tucks it safely away in the bedside drawer where she’s hidden Emily. Then the larger mirror shards; vacuuming gets the rest. When it becomes time to choose, the puddle of coagulated blood in her living room seems less frightening. The bathroom door stays closed.

At some point the painkillers start wearing off, numbness giving way to a deep ache before her whole body tenses up. The surrenders to the striped sofa cushions, hoping her back isn’t bleeding again. It’d be a shame now when she’s just scrubbed the floorboards clean.

The only thing to indicate it has been minutes and not hours when her cell phone rings on the coffee table beside her is the fact that Mulder isn’t here yet. The only thing that gives her the willpower to reach for it despite her protesting shoulders is the fact that it might be him again.

Is that what she would have begged for, had she reached the phone in time? _Mulder, I need your help!_

Stretched out on her back, eyes still closed, she answers. “Scully.”

“Agent Scully?”

Despite his usual gruffness, in those two words, Skinner sounds almost compassionate. Scully is still up, back straight, feet flat on the floor in less than two seconds: Ahab with his Navy discipline would never stand for his children showing such disrespect for an authority, and his very best Starbuck knows it, please and thank you. “Yes, Sir?”

“I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time?”

She is reminded of _how are you_ , thinks yet again, _right now or in general_ , does not say, _I think these days are a bad time all around, Sir._ Says, “no, not at all, Sir. How can I help you?”

He snorts. “By using you medical leave as intended and getting some rest. I’m calling to help _you_ , Dana.” He pauses then, making Scully wonder if he's shocked himself by dropping the formalities. On the other hand, she didn’t know she was on _medical_ leave; it’s a fact that she might not be, that Skinner is simply being kind. Or a liar. “They’re going to schedule the OPR hearing for next week, but you don’t need to worry, you know it’s a formality…”

He drones on, background noise for the scene replaying in her head.

She’d seen them so clearly, the Devil and her would-be avenging angel behind him, smelled blood, gunpowder, smoke. Felt the adrenaline, the flowerbed of violets blooming beneath her skin, the trigger giving way under her finger, again, again, again. No sound but the ringing in her head.

Church bells. The tolling of the… no, death tolls. She has shot other men, but she has never before emptied her clip into an already neutralised threat.

Skinner has called her, ostensibly, to promise he’ll call again later with a date and time for the hearing, where Jana Cassidy will frown at her, grill her with the tough questions, send her out to sweat for a few minutes, then let another board member relay the decision: that Dana murdered the Devil not in cold blood but in self-defense.

That Special Agent Scully shot serial killer and death fetishist Donald Addie Pfaster in the name of justice. _Here’s your gun and badge, welcome back in business._

When he gets around to the inevitable _how are you holding up?_ she tells him she’s doing fine, thank you very much, and how was his day? It’s only eleven a.m., well, she hopes he’ll have a good day, then.

-

It could be a date. She put her grandmother’s tablecloth on last week perhaps with exactly - oh, almost exactly - _this_ in mind, and he showed up half an hour later than she would have liked but with a bouquet of fresh white tulips. Designated tall person, he even grabbed a vase from above the fridge without prompting.

No plates, though, and the disposable flatware came with the food.

She wonders how much time he spent choosing the salad. Not long at all, perhaps, but then how much time he spent convincing himself it was the right choice, arguing with himself over whether to feed her otherwise much-ridiculed _health-nut rabbit-habits_ at a time such as this.

What she knows from the logo printed on one of the paper bags he came in with, though, is that he drove all the way to the other side of the city just to get her this particular _spiced lean chicken salad_. Ninety-seven, some alleyway disappearance, definitely not an x-file - but it was while she had chemo treatments on the weekends and he didn’t want to drag her across the country. They’d gotten lunch from this hole-in-the-wall deli, and the food somehow managed to both excite her taste buds and stay down; a miracle she’d praised to the heavens.

“This is good,” she decides again around a mouthful of crunchy greens.

Mulder swallows his own bite of roast beef sandwich. “Thanks, I suppose. I’ll, uh… pass your compliments to the chef next time I stop… by…” He trails off on a high note and mix of disgust and pure perplexity flickers across his face before he fishes out a pickle. She giggles; he drops the limp vegetable in his paper wrapping turned plate. Two more join it with resounding _smats_ before he wipes his fingers, though he grins himself when he looks up to see her with a hand clamped over her mouth, trying to stifle her laughter. “C’mon, Scully, they’re… _yuck_. Not even rabbits want to eat those - goddamn - fermented veggies.”

“No, I’m so sorry, Mulder,” she deadpans once she regains control, “I mean, how _dare_ they, putting green stuff in your masculine, meaty sandwich.” She cocks her head then, _mistake, mistake, mistake._ He must see it on her face, his easy grin disappearing even before the groan rips from her throat.

He’s around the table and on his knees beside her when she opens her eyes again. “Jesus, Scully, you okay?”

The other paper bag: mortar and pestle, prescription painkillers she had not been prescribed. _Courtesy of the gunmen_ , he’d admitted, clearly not sure how she would feel about the guys stepping in like that. She’d mumbled a thanks and swallowed two as an appetizer.

She releases her white-knuckled grip on the table’s edge in favour of his shoulder. “Yeah, yeah, just - need to be careful with how I move, I guess. I'm just sore.”

“Those pills aren’t helping?”

The placebo effect had taken hold immediately, or maybe that was just the ease of them like this. Only ever mostly, though. “It’s been not even half an hour, Mulder. Besides, I think I’d need a sedating dose of morphine to completely avoid any pain.” He frowns, leans away when she leans towards him. “Sorry, it’s alright.”

“No, it’s -” he stops, shakes his head, lifts his hands and drops them again. He can’t even _touch_ her, she realises, and that is the one thing she can’t - she can’t - the _one_ thing she has never wanted: this misguided cautiousness. His guilt she's learned to deal with by now, moreover she's Catholic - but she has never thought they would come to _this_ , that he would deny her his effortless physicality.

She starts to draw back herself before his hands finally come up to rest on her shoulders, feather-light when she needs him to _ground_ her. “Would it be okay if - can I…” his voice is rough; she’ll hate him if he starts crying, but then his thumbs slide up her neck, coming to rest behind her jaw. She holds onto his wrists, _and you stay there_. “Would a massage help?”

She is the one who’s been shoving her tongue down his throat at every chance she’s gotten, and yet he’s sitting here on his fucking knees in her kitchen asking permission to give her a shoulder rub.

 _We’ve slept together_ , she wants to hiss at him, except that they haven’t, have they. They were asleep, naked, in the same bed together - and sure they’ve fucked in his kitchen and on his dining table - but they haven’t _slept together_. The desperation with which she longs for his hands on her must be the greater of her sins, but she can’t let it happen, not like this. She’s fragile with more fault lines that the mirror, she’ll scream, break, splinter. Shaking her head, she remembers to blink, to breathe.

Touches his bottom lip with her thumb, taps his chin, doesn’t waver too much. “Can you, uhm… in the bathroom, the candles. Throw them out for me, please?” He nods with a frantic energy, _anythinganythinganything_ , well, she needs a rechristening and as there's no hiding it from him - “all of my soaps, shampoos, bath oils. Hand soap, all of it. Please get rid of it.”

“Okay,” he breathes, hands applying a gentle pressure. “Okay.”

Because she can’t let herself be completely helpless, she decides, “there’s a convenience store just down the street. I’m going down there to buy something else.”

“Okay,” he repeats. If he’s unhappy about it, he’s hiding it well. He gets back on his feet, kisses her forehead on his way up before disappearing down the hallway. The bathroom door creaks like it’s always done.

The coat still feels odd without the extra three inches, but she brings her cell phone, deciding to call her mother on the way. Easier to finish a conversation quickly like that; _I have to run now, Mom, I’m at the grocery store, but see you at mass!_

Keeps up appearances, too.

-

The hot water made her malleable. Mulder - has reduced her to a liquid herself. He could drink her up, and she's ready to beg him.

They'll both drown.

They have to stop.

She releases his lip but remains so close as to touch the corner of his mouth when she speaks. “Mulder… I very much like this, but I don’t think -”

“No, if you’re in too much pain, we shouldn't -”

“It's not that.”

He draws back. “We don’t have to do anything you're not comfortable with, Scully,” and isn't he the perfect gentleman when his hands slide from her hips to the mattress.

It’s possible she should have known in the kitchen. Possible she should have known when he didn’t get in the bathtub with her, but then she didn’t ask, and he of the genteel New England breeding would never assume. Possible, then, that she should have known by the way he sat kneeling, atoning for someone’s sins until she intertwined their fingers, dragged his hand between her breast and surged up to capture his mouth; water sloshing over the edge of the tub to soak his jeans.

He’d kissed her back then, his other hand disappearing under bubbles, sliding up her thigh. Still, once the water started to cool down, so did he, fleeing to let her get dressed alone.

Back in her silk pajamas, she found him crawling around on her bed, smoothing down fresh linens. Far from Navy precision, but he had surrendered when she pushed him flat on his back and climbed on top.

At least she thought he had surrendered, and although he remains raised up on his elbows now, this is when she _does_ know: “Don't you ever dare think I'm afraid of you.”

He shakes his head as she draws back. He's still hard, at least. “M'not thinking that.”

“I'm not afraid of sex, either.”

A single finger taps against her knee. “No. No, I don't think so.” He swallows. “I think… you might be afraid of being afraid. Of what it would mean, if you were.”

And damn him. Avoiding his eyes is paramount then, though her hands find their way back under his shirt. She can’t get close enough; skin-to-skin contact provides for safety and love through osmosis and Mulder, she’s found, has twenty-five years of build-up to share. If she starts ripping his clothes off _now_ , though, they'll be back to discussing that padded cell.

He scoots back up against the headboard, hooking two fingers behind each of her knees to drag her along. “What would it mean, Scully, to be afraid?”

“I don’t know.” She feels him tense up, ready to argue. Stops him with a thumb on those lips. “No, I don’t think you’re wrong. I, ah… my abduction. Antarctica. Mulder, I don’t remember what - they did, or maybe I do and I’m just not sure of those memories. But I know… what they took. I can’t have children.” Three months, that. Another, little more than two years; “Emily…”

Once the first drop soak into the fabric of his shirt over where her one hand is still resting, she can’t seem to stop. The _easy_ thought, then, is that that’s why she breaks off: what’s been done to her should be told in anger, not in tears.

Still Mulder waits long enough to allow her a chance to continue before he says it: “it’s medical rape.”

 _“Yes,”_ she gasps, tasting salt. “But Pfaster - I don’t - I’ll never know, but it was still - a sexual violation, and I don’t -” when she starts heaving, his hands wander up her thighs again, thumbs whispering across the silk in secret code. _Breathe_ , he spells, and she does, rests her forehead against his, eyes closed. “Mulder… you have no idea how much I want you. But I don’t want this to be like last time.”

This time when he starts to object, she shuts him up with a decisive kiss. Nibbling along his jawline, though, she can’t say that she blames him: they're on a bed, she is very much in control on top of him, they're both still wearing clothes. They’re _communicating_. This - is nothing like _last time_.

She rocks back again, not missing his little groan. “I don’t want this to be an, ah… attempt at healing. Or proving myself.”

“Scully. Scully, you don’t have to prove yourself to me. You know that, right?”

She shakes her head. “No, not to you.”

He traces the ouroboros, circling in the wrong direction. Unwinding - unwinding her. “I’m glad,” he says at last, plants kisses along the salt tracks down her cheeks before leaning back again. Eyes asking, _to who, then?_

Maybe to the Navy brat with her innate _need_ to meet expectations, only creating more of her own as she checked off Ahab’s. The pathology student who made the first Y-incision on a dare; the one who sank into the scented bubbles, eyes-closed-breath-held. The scientist who had to know if she was still capable, after; the one who now needs evidence that _they_ aren't bound to be a volatile reaction.

“Mulder,” she starts. A thousand of those, _Mulder, it’s me. It’s me, Mulder_. The one he’s never really told her about, the _Mulder! I need your help!_ replaying on his answering machine every night for three months. He wore her cross.

She tells him, “I _have_ expectations about how I will feel, should feel. What I _want_ is a healthy reaction to what I would like to be a healthy relationship with you.” What she wants is to be able to love him without reservation, without suspicion of herself. “I need to be able to know, without a doubt, that I did not sleep with you as a reaction to a - a trauma.” To be able to not conflate love and dependency. “And I - am not sure that’s possible if - it couldn’t happen now and, and _not_ mean -”

“Jesus, sweetheart, I’m -” he wraps around her, drawing his knees up to keep her close, and with the pressure and _sweetheart_ she realises she’s heaving again. “Shh, I know. I know.”

No, you -” she needs to not be a victim or an x-file or a puzzle piece in his quest. “I want - we _get_ to have this, Mulder. Just us, nothing - no-one else -”

“Just us, Scully,” he promises, warm hands pressing against her ribs. “Here, deep breaths, s’easy. Easy…”

When he keeps kissing away the salt, it could be.

-

At some point, they get up to eat dinner, go through nighttime routines. She demands he takes a shower. At some point, they end up back in bed, sharing minty-fresh breath and a pillow. Entangled like they were when she woke up at his apartment.

“Why are your feet always so damn cold?” He gives the one trapped between his shins a light squeeze.

He didn’t bring a spare t-shirt, and she didn’t let him know that he has at least a couple hidden away at the back of her bottom drawer. She breathes in the warmth of his skin. “They’re not, though. You’re just a furnace.”

“Thank you,” he whispers, tugs her impossibly closer. Even as his hands climb up under her shirt and up her back, she thinks the single layer of silk pajamas between them is too much.

“Mmh. For what, though?”

“For telling me. It - means a lot.” And it would: her Mulder is overflowing with affection, yet he has received so little himself. If trusting him is all it takes, she can do that - and better yet. “I think… I understand.” A cautious smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth then. “Although I also have to say I that I do have a fairly good idea of how much you want me.”

And so there it is: she appreciates his ease, his jokes. They’re just taking this slow, nothing else to it. “Yeah,” she smiles. “I thought I might have noticed a little something.”

“Ouch. So that’s how it is, huh?” She nods against him, sneaks her hand between them to work at the buttons while he sighs into her hair. “Hmm. You’re a real challenge, Scully, you know that?”

“I want… to ask you if you think you can handle one more challenge,” shrugging her shirt of her shoulders, then. “Is this okay?”

His breath catches before he moves in to steal hers away, kissing her love-dizzy and humming something or other, _God, Scully, I think I can control myself,_ a hand slipping under her waistband. ”Just let me help?”

**Author's Note:**

> say hi on [tumblr](https://catarinquar.tumblr.com)!


End file.
